


This Choice

by suitesamba



Series: The "This" Series [10]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Fluff, M/M, recent past Mary/John
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 02:39:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1728038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitesamba/pseuds/suitesamba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Mary turns the tables on Sherlock, confronts John and John makes his allegiances clear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Choice

**Author's Note:**

> "This" is a series of fix-it fics, beginning with "This Kiss" (here) which tells the story of a stag night never interrupted by Mrs. Hudson and the client. Angst, fluff, some h/c, some firsts, some sex, Sherlock learning the relationship ropes and in the past couple installments, addressing the baby issue and making it clear where home is to John.

This Choice

Mary is a clever, clever woman.

Sherlock admires this cleverness. He admires her tenacity. He knows nearly everything about her now, everything she wants to forget. Everything she’s kept from John.

But now – now she’s turned the tables on him. A week after she caught Billy Wiggins watching her, Sherlock has caught Billy following _him_. It hadn’t taken much to get the story out of Wiggins – he’d only had to threaten to twist his arm. And as said arm was in a sling….

Mary’s was a simple plan. Simple and effective.

Billy was to text Mary when Sherlock left the flat. Follow him at a discreet distance. And if Sherlock showed any sign of returning to the flat before two hours had passed, Billy was to allow himself to be seen by Sherlock, then let Sherlock drag him off somewhere to get the story out of him, but to take his time telling it.

Sherlock spots him in the library – Billy Wiggins simply cannot blend in with the library crowd – an hour and ten minutes after leaving 221B.

One hour and thirty-five minutes after leaving 221B, Sherlocck bursts into the flat to find John alone, sitting in his chair.

There is no bullet through his brain, no knife in his heart. He looks, in fact, even better than he did when Sherlock left. He’s showered, freshly shaved, and out of his dressing gown. The collar of his shirt hides the burgeoning bruise Sherlock respectfully left on his neck this morning.

John stares at the slightly-out-of-breath Sherlock. He is clearly unhappy, clearly grappling with something weighty. 

“How did you know?” he asks. “To come back here?” 

“Wiggins.” Sherlock approaches John, keeping his eyes on him as he sits in his own chair. Their knees nearly touch – the chairs have been pulled closer together. “Mary paid him to follow me.” He is studying John’s face – John is angry, torn. Between what? Pleasure and pain? Happiness and sorrow? Excitement and disappointment?

“She’s pregnant,” John says, as if it wasn’t true until he’d heard the words from Mary herself.

“We knew that already,” Sherlock replies. He leans forward, places his hand on John’s knee because he needs to touch him, especially now when his thoughts are full of Mary. “What else?”

John looks like he’s practicing some new meditation technique based on Lamaze breathing. He sucks in a breath, blows it out and up as if making smoke rings out of air.

“It might be mine. Or the new boyfriend’s. Or the old boyfriend’s.” He laughs harshly. “Three of us within a week.”

“That certainly seems…excessive,” Sherlock says carefully. “Did you suggest non-invasive prenatal paternity testing?”

“Did I suggest _what_?” John asks, looking at Sherlock with the same sort of look he’d had when Sherlock had admitted having deleted the solar system.

“A blood test. Non-invas….”

“I know what you said,” John cuts in. “But how do _you_ know this? It’s only been around a couple years, Sherlock.”

Sherlock makes the mistake of looking away. “Case.”

John swats at Sherlock’s knee. “You looked it up. You’ve already been thinking about this.”

“Of course I’ve been thinking about this!” Sherlock exclaims. “Don’t tell me you haven’t!”

“Of course I’ve been thinking about it!” John is angry and frustrated. 

They look at each other, and Sherlock, unbelievably, correctly reads the hurt in John’s eyes.

“You’re angry about her sleeping with other men.”

John’s face registers his displeasure. “I didn’t even know her, did I? She slept with David that night – that Sunday night after I left here to go talk things out with her. And within a week after that she had herself a new boyfriend.”

Sherlock raises an eyebrow. “You do realise….”

John looks away, shakes his head. “I know,” he mutters. “Pot, kettle.”

“John – if it’s yours….”

“It won’t matter. She’s leaving. Moving to the States.”

This is news to Sherlock. He’s discovered much about Mary, and knows she is from Chicago, and knows what she did there, how she got started, but there have been no indications that she’s planning to return. He thinks she is lying – trying to punish John.

“She didn’t tell me at first, you know,” John says. “She only told me she was pregnant – and I think she just assumed I’d come back to her, get married after all.” He isn’t wringing his hands in distress. He only sounds tired. “She only told me after – when I asked when the baby was due, and told her she could count on me being the best father I could be, if it turned out to be mine.”

Sherlock had been staring at his hands, steepled before his face. He looked up at John’s words, surprised.

“That didn’t sit well with her, I take it?”

John shook his head. “When it was clear I wasn’t planning to leave here –” He shook his head. “Leave _you_ ,” he corrected, “her attitude changed.” He laughed harshly. “That’s when she told me what I already knew – that she had a new boyfriend – and what I didn’t – that she’d slept with David the night I called off the wedding. That it could be any of ours, but that I was the only one she wanted as a father to her child, and if I wouldn’t have her, she was planning to take an offer from an old employer and return to the States.”

Sherlock’s hand falls off of John’s knee and John cocks his head, studying Sherlock’s face.

“What?”he asks. 

“Do you want a child?” Sherlock asks. It is the question he’s wanted to ask this past week, the one he’s not asked because he didn’t know how to ask it, or how to respond to John’s answer.

John catches his eyes, holds them, regards Sherlock intently.

Sherlock persists, repeats the question quietly.

“It’s a simple yes or no question, John. Do you want a child?”

John face, intense, thoughtful, stares back at Sherlock for an uncomfortably long while, then breaks into a slow smile. It’s soft on his not-so-soft face. And Sherlock sees that the smile is for him, and has nothing to do with fatherhood or the child that may or may not be his. 

“You,” John says. He stands and steps into the vee of Sherlock’s legs. Sherlock looks up into John’s oddly peaceful face. John touches his cheek, then works his hand behind Sherlock’s neck, presses fingers against his scalp. “A yes or no question? I don’t think so Sherlock. A child? Any child? This child?” He settles one knee onto the chair, between Sherlock’s thigh and the cushioned side. “If this is my child, I’ll be the best father I can be, wherever that child is. If this is not my child, Sherlock – there won’t be any children for me. I thought I made that clear when I left Mary two weeks before our wedding.”

Sherlock quickly tamps down all the past he’s dredged up about Mary Morstan this past week, archiving it if not deleting it, and looks at John. He cannot keep the smile off his face. John grins at him.

“Only you can make me smile after a morning like this one,” he says. “Simple yes or no question my arse.”

Sherlock wraps his arms around John’s back and pulls him tight against him, and John neatly drops into his lap as they kiss away the uncomfortable morning. John’s home is here. At 221B. With Sherlock. Amid all the uncertainly, he has made this, at least, abundantly clear.


End file.
